SC09 announces suite of focus areas

This week SC09 announced (warning, PDF) the focus areas for its technical program. This year the conference is placing special emphasis on biocomputing, sustainability, and the 3D internet

“We chose these three focus areas for the conference because they are so fundamentally important to human health and the health of our planet, and, in the case of the 3D Internet, to how we share, interact with and understand information,” said Dr. Wilfred Pinfold, general chair of the SC09 conference and Director, Extreme Scale Programs at Intel. “The technical program will show how HPC technologies provide a powerful tool to support work in bio-computing, sustainability and the 3D Internet and will help people make scientific and engineering breakthroughs in these areas.”

Looking at the three focus areas in a little more detail we find that

The Bio-Computing Focus Area will explore research that harnesses the power of HPC to solve problems in the biological sciences, including computational techniques that can be used to understand the behaviors of genes and proteins that can trigger cancers and other serious diseases. Techniques used to organize, access and understand the huge volumes of biological data collected by researchers also will be explored.

…The Sustainability Focus Area will examine issues that make headlines every day, including how to maintain environmental quality, how to develop and deploy renewable and clean energy supplies, and how to improve energy efficiency in businesses, data centers and the home.

…The 3D Internet Focus Area will look at ways in which 3D visualization and immersive environments such as Second Life are changing the way we communicate, share information, educate students and explore scientific problems.

Resource Links:

Latest Video

Industry Perspectives

In this Nvidia podcast, Bryan Catanzaro from Baidu describes how machines with Deep Learning capabilities are now better at recognizing objects in images than humans. “AI gets better and better until it kind of disappears into the background,” says Catanzaro — NVIDIA’s head of applied deep learning research — in conversation with host Michael Copeland on this week’s edition of the new AI Podcast. “Once you stop noticing that it’s there because it works so well — that’s when it’s really landed.” [Read More...]

White Papers

This white paper reviews common HPC-environment challenges and outlines solutions that can help IT professionals deliver best-in-class HPC cloud solutions—without undue stress and organizational chaos.